With its first year under the belt, Nintendo"s Switch got off to a very strong start and became the fastest selling console in the business"s history. In fact, demand for the hybrid console kept up throughout the year, with the company chalking up 4.7 million units sold as of July 2017 then announcing increased production of the device ahead of the holiday season early in October. Nintendo, usually conservative in its estimates, even went as far as to bump up its estimate of units sold for the fiscal year ending March 2018 from 10 million to 14 million.
Today, the gaming stalwart released its full-year earnings containing a rather solid set of results. On the software front, Super Mario Odyssey was a great success story having sold 10.41 million units worldwide alongside Mario Kart 8 Deluxe which accounted for 9.22 million units. These titles were two of the 12 games that ended up being "million-seller titles" inclusive of third-party publishers for the Switch platform. All up, 63.51 million software units were sold during the fiscal year. These results buoyed sales of the Switch, with sales topping 15.05 million consoles for the period, beating its revised projection by just over one million.
Meanwhile, the Nintendo 3DS continued to perform strongly with 6.4 million sold, beating out the 5.28 million SNES Classic Edition retro consoles bought during the course of the reporting year. In total, Nintendo"s operating profit for the year amounted to just under ¥178 billion ($1.624 billion), a staggering 500% increase compared to last year"s relatively meager result of ¥29.4 billion ($269.4 million).
In conjunction with the announcement of its financial results, the Japanese company took the opportunity to publicize the appointment of Shuntaro Furukawa as the next president of Nintendo, taking over from Tatsumi Kimishima who will retire in June. Kimishima was entrusted with leading the business after his predecessor, Satoru Iwata, passed away at the age of 55 back in 2015. Furukawa, aged 46, has been at Nintendo for nearly 25 years, most recently involved in software development in addition to the design of the Switch.